We had a great time learning all about dinosaurs during the past two weeks. The children have learned about the different kinds of dinosaurs, what they ate, how big they were, and that they are now extinct. They can easily name dinosaurs in our classroom collection as well as in the numerous classroom books and know exactly what their names are. Our budding paleontologists also taught our class many new dinosaur facts too.

Development
The children continue signing their names each morning. We have also added dinosaur words to our alphabet wall. We worked together as a group and wrote an invitation to the Young 3’s class to visit our classroom.

Math
The children had fun measuring our “growing dinosaur” using unifix cubes to see how much it grew every day. We researched books to find out how large the dinosaurs really were. Then we also went out into the hall to measure dinosaur length and see just how long or tall the dinosaurs really were. One was as large as a school bus and another one could fit inside a grocery store.

Language/Literacy
We are continuing to work on the sounds of the letters in words. We learned many new words that have to do with dinosaurs, like: herbivore, carnivore, extinct, predator, prey and the many dinosaur names. They can be quite tricky to pronounce.

Science
During our dinosaur theme we made fossils, erupted volcanos, and made a tar pit for the dinosaurs. Pretending to be Paleontologists has been a lot of fun in the classroom. The children especially enjoyed looking for fossils in our sensory table.

On numerous occasions the children mentioned that they visited a natural history museum and have seen dinosaur bones. Here is a link to the natural history museum that you might want to check out with your child: http://www.cmnh.org/site/Index.aspx or http://www.dinosaurstatepark.org.

What’s Next?
We will be learning about frogs for the next several weeks. First, we will set up our aquarium as a frog habitat and then research different types of frogs to decide which one would be best suited for our classroom habitat. When the tadpoles arrive in our class we will do observational drawings as we will watch our tadpoles become frogs.
The children have been working hard earning marbles with good behavior to reach our habitat and frog goal. They are to be congratulated on their hard work!